In 2004, Sam Harris published The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason that became a major bestseller. This marked the first of a series of series of bestsellers that took a harder line against religion than has been the custom among secularists: Letter to a Christian Nation by Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Dan Dennett, God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Goes Not Exist by myself, and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. These authors have been recognized as the leaders of a movement called The New Atheism.
In this presentation I will review and expand upon the principles of New Atheism and answer many of its critics. I will suggest that naturalism, the view that everything is matter an nothing more, is sufficient to explain all we observe in the universe from the most distant galaxies to the inner workings of the brain that result in the phenomenon of mind. Nowhere is it necessary to introduce God or the supernatural to understand the world. Disputing the claim that science has nothing to say about God and arguing that absence of evidence is evidence of absence when evidence should be there and is not. In the case of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, the lack of evidence is sufficient to conclude that he does not exist beyond a reasonable doubt.
Victor Stenger is emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a research fellow of the Center for Inquiry. Stenger has also held visiting positions at the University of Heidelberg, Oxford and has been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, and the University of Florence.
He has published nine books for general audiences on physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, philosophy, religion, atheism, and pseudoscience, the latest of which is The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason, which was released in September 2009. Stenger announced that work has begun on a tenth book, tentatively titled The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: How the Universe is Not Designed for Humanity.
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